Paperback Writer
by brihana25
Summary: Sketchy writes his first "real" book, and he asks Alec's opinion on it. fox las Round 1, Challenge 1 submission. Gen. COMPLETE


**FANDOM: **Dark Angel  
**TITLE: **Paperback Writer  
**GENRE: **Gen  
**CATEGORY: **Drama (I guess)  
**SEASON: **Two (between Love Among the Runes and Freak Nation)  
**RATING: **PG  
**WORD COUNT: **1000  
**AUTHOR'S NOTES: **written for Round One, Challenge One of the fox_las challenge on LiveJournal: _[character] reads a book about themselves_

**SUMMARY: **Sketchy writes his first "real" book, and he asks Alec's opinion on it.

**DISCLAIMER: **Dark Angel, its characters and situations, are copyright James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. No infringement on, or challenge to, their status is intended. This piece of fiction was written strictly for the entertainment of other fans, and I am gaining no form of compensation for it.  
**MORE DISCLAIMERS: **This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual places and locations, is purely coincidental.

Criticism and feedback of all kinds is welcome. Anonymous comments welcomed and encouraged, too. :)

**WARNINGS: **none

* * *

Sketchy was sitting across the table from him, trying to look like he wasn't impatiently waiting for Alec to look at him, and doing a lousy job of it.

Alec ignored him and flipped through the pages again, stopping to reread some of the sections that had seemed questionable, or fictionalized, or just plain wrong. He'd read the whole book already – four times in the hour he and Sketchy had been sitting at their usual table in the back room at Crash, not that he was going to tell Sketch that – and he didn't know what else he expected to find. There was very little left that could surprise him any more than the paperback in his hands already had.

No one was supposed to know about the X5R series. No one was supposed to know how the 09er's twins had been reindoctrinated, repurposed, and retrained after the escape. No one was supposed to know about Arizona Platoon or the Phoenix Project. None of the government types had known about it. No one at Manticore knew about it, either, except for the eight men in charge and, at the end, Renfro. Every single one of those nine people was either dead or presumed dead.

So where the hell had Sketchy gotten this?

"X5R, huh?" That was all he said. It was all he could bring himself to say.

"Scary, aren't they?" Sketchy asked. The excitement that he'd shown when he'd first joined Alec at the table was back. He looked like a little kid who'd eaten too much candy, and he was literally bouncing up and down in his chair. "I mean, we thought the regular Transgenics were bad, ya know? But these things..."

Sketchy leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, as if he was about to let Alec in on some horrible secret. "Assassins. All of them. Programmed just to kill people." Sketchy sat back in his chair, keeping his hand on his beer glass and wiping at the sweat that ran down the outside. "What kinda freak doesn't do anything but kill people? Ya know?"

Alec nodded his head slowly and turned the book over in his hand. He couldn't bring himself to look up at Sketchy yet, but he knew he'd have to at some point. "Yeah," he muttered. "Sick freaks, right?"

"We gotta figure out where these things are," Sketchy said, continuing on as if Alec hadn't even spoken. "It's bad enough that we've got these genetic mutations running around, but at least we can spot them. These X5Rs, these murderers? They look just like us, man. Just like you and me." A shudder ran across Sketchy's shoulders, but Alec couldn't tell if it was real or fake. "There's thirteen murderers running around Seattle, and we can't do anything about them."

No, there weren't thirteen X5Rs in Seattle, but Sketchy had no way of knowing that. He didn't know that 206 and 211 had died during training, or that four others had been sent to the basement for their failure to pass. Sketchy didn't know that four of the X5Rs had been on assignment the night Manticore burned, didn't know that Lane was in Rome, or that Keema, Jewel and Devon were all somewhere else in Europe. Sketchy didn't know that Sam had moved to Canada with her husband and son. No one, not even Alec, knew what had happened to Marin.

There weren't thirteen X5Rs in Seattle; there was only one.

X5R-494, at your service.

"Where'd you get all this from?" He forced himself to look up then, but he couldn't hold Sketch's eyes for more than a few seconds. "It all sounds pretty crazy. You're sure it's true?"

"Yeah, it's true!" Sketchy insisted. "Some ex-Manticore guy gave me all these files and stuff, and it was all in there. I mean, there's other stuff in there, too, but this..." Sketch reached across the table and tapped the cover of the book with the end of his finger. "This is huge. This is gonna get me out of JamPony once and for all. Make me a real writer."

Alec wondered if Sketchy's mysterious source had known exactly what he'd had in his hands, wondered what his purpose in giving those files to Sketchy had been. But mostly, he wondered who it was. The suspect pool was incredibly narrow. Maybe the rumors of Sandoval's death weren't true. Maybe Lydecker was still alive somewhere.

"Nothing but the facts, huh, Sketch?"

"The people need to know what's out here," Sketchy said. "Genetically engineered assassins with no soul? No conscience? No purpose except killing? That's a story that everyone should know about."

Except none of it was true.

"And you don't think there's a chance they could change?"

Sketchy shook his head emphatically. "Nah. No way. Killing is all they've ever known. They're not human, and they never will be."

No, Sketchy was wrong about that, too. Alec wasn't cursed to bring death and destruction to everyone he cared about. He wasn't doomed to kill them all the way he'd killed Rachel. When Manticore called the shots, he hadn't had a choice in what he was, but Manticore was gone. His life was his own, and he was finally starting to realize that. He was finally starting to accept that despite all of the differences between them, he was just as human as Sketchy and Logan were.

Alec finally looked up, finally met Sketchy's eye and held it. And he smiled.

"I'm gonna hope you're wrong about that," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to," Alec answered. He pushed himself to his feet, dropped the book on the table in front of Sketchy, and walked away.

And that was the truth, he realized, as he walked up the stairs and out into the streets of Seattle. He wanted Sketchy to be wrong, about everything. But more than that – he needed him to be.


End file.
